3D digital models greatly facilitate the distribution and storage of information. While its copyright protection problems attract more and more research interests. A novel secure digital watermarking algorithm for 3D models is proposed in this paper. In order to survive most attacks like rotation, cropping, smoothing, adding noise, etc, the projection of the model's point set is chosen as the carrier of the watermark in the presented algorithm, in which contains the copyright information as logos, text, and so on. Then projection of the model's point set onto x, y and z plane are calculated respectively. Before watermark embedding process, the original watermark is scrambled by a key. Each projection is singular value decomposed, and the scrambled watermark is embedded into the SVD(singular value decomposed) domain of the above x, y and z plane respectively. After that we use the watermarked x, y and z plane to recover the vertices of the model and the watermarked model is attained. Only the legal user can remove the watermark from the watermarked models using the private key. Experiments are presented in the paper to show that the proposed algorithm has good performance on various malicious attacks.